Archive for category report

How to Use Custom Reports to Generate Efforts and Cost Totals in TargetProcess

Posted by Michael Dubakov in customization, howto, report, report engine on May 12th, 2009

Quite often we’re asked questions on how to align TargetProcess agile framework with down-to-earth life — like expenses forecast, sum of efforts based on resource usage for each particular activity, the total cost of the project. These items sound more MS Project like (check what we think of MS Project) but we give credit to the real business needs and in this post we’ll share a technique to get those reports and calculations.

Suppose, you’re planning a project. You need to calculate the efforts and costs for QA, implementation, deployment to production, post production support etc. Each user story has all these stages, but they intertwine without following each other linearly (read more on the benefits of feature-based development vs. stage-based development )

To track these activities/stages across an iteration or a release, you can create tasks within a user story, like here:

User stories with tasks

You can create custom report that will calculate total time for Specification, Development, Testing, Test Cases across iteration. Here’s how:

Summary fields in custom report

And here’s the report:

Iteration activity custom report

Time reports can be used for cost calculations based on an hourly rate.

You’re welcome to comment and contact us with questions about your particular custom reporting case.

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Using Custom Reports: Time Spent on Releases

Posted by Michael Dubakov in howto, report, report engine on January 27th, 2009

How much time we spent on a particular release? Quite interesting question that can be answered using Custom Reports functionality. For example, last release of TargetProcess v.2.12 took about 5,500 hours. That is MUCH more than any of the previous releases. OK, let’s try to create the report.

Step 1

Navigate to Custom Reports and click Create New report button. Select Release entity.

Step 2

Add Start Date and End Date fields to the report in Fields tab.

Step 3

Click to Summary Fields tab and specify new summary field as shown on the picture below

Step 4

Click Settings tab, specify report name and Run it.

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Report Engine Implementation Moving Forward

Posted by Michael Dubakov in iteration, report, report engine on November 30th, 2007

We’ve completed Iteration #12.4 and added some really nice features into Report Engine. It is possible to add summary columns, group entities and add simple charts. Here are some examples of real reports (they are working)

We will add some fancy functions during next two weeks and most likely v.2.7 with Report Engine will be released in the middle of December. So far you may play with Report Engine at http://preview.targetprocess.com (admin / admin).

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TargetProcess v.2.7 Progress. Iteration #12.3 Completed

Posted by Michael Dubakov in iteration, report, report engine on November 23rd, 2007

Today we’ve completed third iteration of v.2.7. Report engine implementation going really well and right now it is possible to extract list of entities with

  • defined columns (including related entities columns)
  • set columns order
  • defined filters (including related entities filters)

For example, you may extract all user stories with all columns like Name, Effort, Iteration Name, Feature Name where User Story Effort = 0 and User Story Feature Priority is Must Have.

It is required to add calculations to the reports engine as well as more flexible columns. In final release it will be possible to create let’s say a report like that

ID

User Story Name

Test Cases Passed

Test Cases Failed

Total Test Cases

Open Bugs

12

Workflow per project

8

4

12

5

33

Custom field type (numeric)

4

0

4

0

45

Average column

3

0

3

2

Development of Program Releases Management is in progress as well. In this iteration we’ve added product backlog to release plan with sorting and filtering options. There are some things to do in next iteration like drag and drop planning, release date forecasting and some smaller things.

Also we’ve integrated Selenium tests with Cruise Control and at least we have good build process setup :)

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TargetProcess v.2.7 Progress (program level release planning)

Posted by Michael Dubakov in release, report on November 20th, 2007

We are continuing development of v.2.7. It will contain such things as program level release planning and custom reporting. Also we are re-styling user interface. You may check progress at preview.targetprocess.com (admin / admin)

Program level release planning will resolve many problems of large projects. It will provide full view on all projects releases and will allow to synchronize releases and re-plan them. Also it will show planned and forecasted product release dates.

Planning will work via drag and drop. We think that this feature will be great for product planning and high level progress tracking.

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TargetProcess 2.4 Released - SCRUM, Reporting and Productivity!

Posted by Michael Dubakov in release, report, scrum on May 4th, 2007

Today we’ve released new version of TargetProcess. This release was SCRUM oriented and many things for better scrum support were added like customizable terminology, Task Board and impediments management. Now TargetProcess fits greatly for SCRUM dev. process and if you use SCRUM you should take a look at it.

The other goal was better reporting. Now you may generate various reports for several projects using simple UI.

As usual, this release contains many usability and productivity improvements. For example, you may select current iteration or release in drop downs with one click, finish iteration with two clicks and split user story with easy.

TargetProcess is available as On-Site or On-Demand version ($25 per user per month). We are receiving more and more very positive feedback from customers. So go ahead and try TP, you will be satisfied :)

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